Head tracking in a FPS could be a very cool addition without taking your hands off the controller. This could give the effect of looking through a window, where repositioning yourself physically changes what you see on the screen. If done well, this could even be done with multiple players splitscreen without people bumping into each other. Even without using the changing first person perspective, head tracking could be used in other games for commands. Shake your head yes or no for silent communication among teammates or npc's, tilt your head to the side to peek around a corner or look behind you, and these are natural gestures that can easily be implemented into games without asking the players to do anything awkward. Add in voice recognition and you could even coordinate an attack with an NPC teammate with some basic commands while continuing the assault yourself with your hands always on the controller.

Yeah, making the kinect mandatory is a little dickish towards both the players and developers alike, but the move makes the possibility of some cool things being done with the kinect more likely than before. It might pay off for them or it might bite them in the ass. Too soon to tell right now.

I think anyone expecting motion control to lead to innovation or advancements is going to be sorely disappointed. It's slower than traditional controls. It's less versatile than traditional controls. It's less reliable than traditional controls. It's less precise than traditional controls.

It's even less inclusive than traditional controls.

I suspect that once you take it past gimmick status, motion control is more likely to stifle innovation than spur it. But then I could be completely wrong too.

Unrelated: Ded, give a holler if you need any more. I haven't the foggiest what that vendor loot actually costs._________________The older I get, the more certain I become of one thing. True and abiding cynicism is simply a form of cowardice.

The Wii's motion controllers were hard to make work as a standard controller and a motion-based controller at the same time, and in general it just made more sense to ignore. Even wii-only titles often needed a hell of a lot of incentive to be convinced to integrate motion sensor functionality in exclusive platform games.

This means:

The Wii controller was sometimes swapped out or held sideways to act as a sort of a traditional controller. It's not real good at a lot of the motion control stuff that Wii is centrally built around when it's being used this way.

What the latter half means — there's lots of games that just went ahead and were designed around standard controller ideal setups. Not just ports, but wii-only ones too. The studios making a lot of these games were frequently seriously persuaded by Nintendo to have motion control in the games where otherwise, by admission of the people working in the studios themselves, they would have skipped out on it entirely. Nintendo often offered a lot of incentives to do so, and so devs who were working on games that really didn't have a lot to gain from their perspective from the inclusion of motion control gimmickry, ended up going along with that. Effectively it compelled a lot of motion control in Wii titles that, as the stories had it, wouldn't have been done without a lot of carrot and/or stick.

Because in a lot of types of games it often seems superfluous or silly beyond, say, buttons and control stick/d pad.

The Wii's motion controllers were hard to make work as a standard controller and a motion-based controller at the same time, and in general it just made more sense to ignore. Even wii-only titles often needed a hell of a lot of incentive to be convinced to integrate motion sensor functionality in exclusive platform games.

This means:

The Wii controller was sometimes swapped out or held sideways to act as a sort of a traditional controller. It's not real good at a lot of the motion control stuff that Wii is centrally built around when it's being used this way.

What the latter half means — there's lots of games that just went ahead and were designed around standard controller ideal setups. Not just ports, but wii-only ones too. The studios making a lot of these games were frequently seriously persuaded by Nintendo to have motion control in the games where otherwise, by admission of the people working in the studios themselves, they would have skipped out on it entirely. Nintendo often offered a lot of incentives to do so, and so devs who were working on games that really didn't have a lot to gain from their perspective from the inclusion of motion control gimmickry, ended up going along with that. Effectively it compelled a lot of motion control in Wii titles that, as the stories had it, wouldn't have been done without a lot of carrot and/or stick.

Because in a lot of types of games it often seems superfluous or silly beyond, say, buttons and control stick/d pad.

I think the difficulty I have here is why you think that doesn't apply to the Xboxone with kinect?_________________

Over 17,000 developers are using the Ouya software development kit to bring games to the new device, including Square Enix Holdings Co Ltd's "Final Fantasy III" and nWay's "ChronoBlade", the company said.

_________________...if a single leaf holds the eye, it will be as if the remaining leaves were not there.http://about.me/omardrake

And it might just. My position is that making it mandatory removes a situation that guarantees future projected kinect redheaded stepchild-dom. They've done the only thing that presents the possibility of significant innovation with motion control. That possibility being present means I or most anyone else mostly settled into the golden nest of PC Gaming Supremacy have an opportunity to care about the console at all. Or any console. It's microsoft's $100 price point loss gamble on giving the next Xbox a unique appeal. If it's still a flop, then I can just shrug my shoulders from the great golden walls and remain of the belief that PC gaming is just unambiguously superior and that the console wars are dumb bullshit I don't have to put up with.

Honestly doesn't shine too bright to me. Controller looks interesting. $99 price tag is kinda nice, but a bit steep for what is essentially an android smartphone without the phone features. You can get Android microcomputers for less than $40 that would likely be able to do everything the Ouya can do and then some.

Games look mehhhhh. Mostly looks like games made for the mobile market, and the current game count is a relatively measly 179. Only thing that caught me eye was the fact it had 3 different emulators that cover the N64, the SNES, and the NES. If they were well done and avoided issues with previous emulators (sprite flicker on NES games, terrible graphics lag while rendering 3D for the N64) then I might consider it.

Overall it gets a meh/10 in my books._________________Hangman, hangman, hold it a little while, I think I see my brother coming, riding many a mile.